Contest Creation and Administration

Hi! This tutorial will be showing you how to create and customize your own contests, as well as what you’re able to do once you’ve made one.

Creating Your Contest

Once you’ve registered your account and logged in, the first step is to get to the contest creation page. Find the “Contests!” tab on the main menu bar and either click the link or mouse over it and then select “Create your own contest” from the sub-menu that appears.

Which ever link you choose, you’ll be taken to this page:

Clicking the highlighted button or the contest creation tab below it will open up the section right below where you can begin to make your own contest.

When you create a contest you will also get access to a Free Investing 101 Course for you class!

We are giving away a free investing101 course for all your students. Visit Investing101.net and have your student register for free with coupon code: HTMWFREE

One of the first question asked is how many students you expect to have. You don’t have to worry about your answer being exact. This question is strictly for our record keeping and it doesn’t actually have any effect on your contest. Just give us your best guess and keep moving along!

If you’re not too familiar with the subject matter, or you’re not sure how you want your contest to be set up, the default contest settings are perfectly fine for most classes. You’ll have a $25,000 budget (no loans/margin trading) and you’ll be able to day trade U.S. stocks/ETFs and mutual funds.

The most important settings to watch out for are your Trading/Registration dates and the privacy/control settings. The default dates always start today and end 3 months from today, for both registration and trading. We usually recommend opening registration at least 1 week before trading begins. This gives everyone time to join before the contest starts and it also gives you some time to change your mind about any settings you may want to adjust.

The default contest setting is Public though you’ll most likely want to make your contest Private and set a password. Make sure have the right privacy setting otherwise you may get total strangers jumping into your class contest!

Once you’ve finalized your registration you’ll be taken to a page which summarizes all your contest settings and, more importantly, gives you the registration link for your contest as you can see below:

Send this link to everyone you wish to invite to join your contest. It will take them to the registration page where they will create their own account and then be automatically registered to your contest. If people know the name of your contest, they can also manually look it up and join it from the contest search as long as they know the password.

As the contest creator you have two options available to you for all contests you’ve created. The first is the ability to edit settings for your contest after you’ve made it and the other is the ability to download a full account report on everyone in your contest. In order to do so just go back to the contest section of your account, scroll down to the “Contests that I created” list and click the “Edit Contest” button as seen below:

This will open up a menu identical to the one you used when you first created your class. You can adjust any settings listed here including the start and end dates of your contest.

One thing to note is that any changes made will not retroactively affect accounts that have already joined your contest, regardless of whether or not they’ve started trading. So for example if you changed the starting cash, this change would only affect people who joined your contest after the change. Your account and everyone else already in the contest would still have the old starting cash value. The same principle applies for enabling and disabling markets. If you let people trade Canadian stocks and then change your mind and disable it, the people who were holding Canadian stocks will no longer be able to sell what they already have.

Once you’ve made the necessary changes, make sure to click “Save” to apply the changes.

As for the account reports, all you need to do is click the “Download Rankings and Registrations” button to begin downloading an excel file with your report. In it you will find every participant’s current open positions, portfolio value and transaction history. The report is updated every morning so as of the start of each trading day, the report will be updated with the previous day’s data.